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In their quest to identify creditworthy customers, some are tapping into the information you and your friends reveal in the virtual stratosphere. Before calling the privacy police, though, understand how it’s really being used.

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To be clear, creditors aren’t accessing the credit reports or scores of those in your social network, nor do those friends affect your personal credit rating. Jewitt asserts that the graphs aren’t being used to penalize borrowers or to find reasons to reject customers, but quite the opposite: “There is an immediate concern that it’s going to affect the ability to get a financial product. But it makes it more likely” that it will work in their favor,” says Jewitt. [vice president of business development of Rapleaf, a San Francisco, Calif., company specializing in social media monitoring.]

I’ll give Jewitt the benefit of the doubt here, and assume he’s sincere. But the issue isn’t will it make it more or less likely to get a loan. The issue is the rate that people will pay. If you think about it from the perspective of a smart banker, they want to segment their loans into slices of more and less likely to pay. The most profitable loans are the ones where people who are really likely to pay them back, but can be convinced that they must pay a higher rate.

The way the banking industry works this is through the emergent phenomenon of credit scores. If banks colluded to ensure you paid a higher rate, it would raise regulatory eyebrows. But since Fair Issac does that, all the bankers know that as your credit score falls, they can charge you more without violating rules against collusion.

Secretive and obscure criteria for differentiating people are a godsend, because most people don’t believe that it matters even when there’s evidence that it does.

Another way to ask this is, “if it’s really likely it will work in my favor, why is it so hard to find details about how it works? Wouldn’t RapLeaf’s customers be telling people about all the extra loans they’re handing out at great rates?”

So from a product management and privacy perspectives I found this article very thought provoking:

Bookioo does not give men any way to learn about or contact the female members of the site. Men can join for free, if they have been invited—and if a current Bookioo member can vouch for their information. They can then post a profile for the perusal of the female—and paying—members of the site. It’s those paying women, however, who get to call the shots.

As interesting as the approach is, what’s more interesting is how they came to it. They focused on a set of female customers, and asked what is it that they worry about, and what do they want? Co-founder David Olmos:

We think that women don’t feel comfortable with the current dating sites. The latter are too masculine: they were designed by men and they fundamentally address men’s needs. We know that many women prefer a different approach: they’re eager to socialize, to meet new people, and we propose to do that through activities. It may lead them to find a partner, of course, but they may as well enjoy an afternoon in a museum with a new girl friend whom they met Bookioo! So we propose to socialize through activities, common hobbies and common tastes.

Those charged with doing the work appear to develop a bunker mentality

In this situation, anyone can offer up their opinions, and most of us do.

It’s hard to figure out which analysis are better than others, because the data about partial failures is harder to get than opinions. And so most opinions are created and appear equal. Recommendations in airline security are all ‘best practices’ which are hard to evaluate.

Now, as Peter Swire has pointedout, the disclosure debate pivots on if an attacker needs to expose themselves in order to test a hypothesis. If the attacker needs to show up and risk arrest or being shot to understand if a device will make it through a magnometer, that’s very different than if an attacker needs to send packets over the internet.

I believe much of this swivels on the fact that most of the security layers have been innocently exposed in many ways. The outline of how the intelligence agencies and their databases work is public. The identity checking is similarly public. It’s easy to discover at home or at the airport that you’re on a list. The primary and secondary physical screening layers are well and publicly described. The limits of tertiary screening are easily discovered, as an unlucky friend discovered when he threw a nazi salute at a particularly nosy screener in Amsterdam’s Schiphol airport. And then some of it comes out when government agencies accidentally expose it. All of this boils down to partial and unstructured disclosure in three ways:

Laws or public inquiries require it

The public is exposed to it or can “innocently” test it

Accidents

In light of all of this, the job of a terrorist mastermind is straightforward: figure out a plan that bypasses the known defenses, then find someone to carry it out. Defending the confidentiality of approaches is hard. Randomization is an effort to change attacker’s risk profiles.

But here’s the thing: between appropriate and important legal controls and that the public goes through the system, there are large parts of it which cannot be kept secret for any length of time. We need to acknowledge that and design for it.

“Agency heads shall complete on a periodic basis a comprehensive review of the agency’s classification guidance, particularly classification guides, to ensure the guidance reflects current circumstances and to identify classified information that no longer requires protection and can be declassified,”

That order lays out a new balance between openness and national security, including terrorism. TSA’s current approach does not meet that new balance.

Publish information about failed attempts and the costs of the system

Stop harassing and intimidating those like Chris Soghoian, Steven Frischling or Christopher Elliott who discuss details of the system.

Encourage and engage in a fuller debate with facts, rather than speculation.

There you have it. We will get better security through a broad set of approaches being brought to the problems. We will get easier travel because we will understand what we’re being asked to do and why. Everyone understand we need some level of security for air travel. Without an acrimonious, ill-informed firestorm, we’ll get more security with less pain and distraction.

Since there’s been so much discussion about the Chrismas Bomber, I want to avoid going over the same ground everyone else is. So as much as I can, I’m going to try to stick to lightly-treaded ground.

This is a failure for the terrorists. A big one. Think about it; put yourself on the other side of the chessboard and read this movie-plot description. Yemeni Al Qaeda has a newly-radicalized, rich engineering student who wants to strike a blow against the evilness of George Clooney and Vera Farmiga. Despite being ratted out by his father, the student gets a visa, likely because he’s “wealthy, quiet, unassuming.” Using the very clever tactic of getting on a plane in Africa and transferring onto an American flight, he has one of the most powerful high explosives known sewn into his pants. Before landing in MoTown, he — fails to detonate it. Think about that again. An engineering student from one of the best universities in the world fails to set off a bomb in his lap. Worse, he ended up with a fire in his pants, leading to many humiliating jokes.

Fail, fail, fail. Epic fail. Face-palm-worthy epic fail. Worse, the US is sending counter-terrorism folks to Yemen to help find the people who planned this epic failure. For them, this is just bad, and about as bad as it gets. Supposedly, recruit these guys with promises of a half-gross of virgins, not with burning their nuts off. Ridicule is one of the most powerful forces there is, and this is deserved.

On top of this, now that the would-be bomber has been captured, he is singing like the proverbial canary. So that means that the planners really should be looking for new places to stay, because even their allies will want to purge losers from their ranks, or at least not take the fall for them.

Yet, all is not lost for the forces of terrorism. The world’s security services have panicked and instituted to security procedures that will actually make it easier for the next person by setting up rules that everyone’s supposed to stay in their seats in the last hour of flight. But that’s pretty slim pickings for them. It’s not even as good as the one-last-shocker in the traditional horror film.

Defense-in-Depth Works. The major problem in fighting terrorism is that the fraction of figure to ground is between six and nine orders of magnitude. If you look at it as a signal processing issue, that’s -60 to -90 decibels of signal in noise.

Any detection system has to deal with false positives and false negatives. In the counter-terrorism biz, that means you have to deal with the inevitability that for every terrorist, you’ll be stopping tens if not hundreds of thousands of innocents. And remember as well, the times that the terrorist is not actually on a terror mission, they’re innocents.

So yeah, the guy was on a watch list. So are a million other people. (And yes, this is a reason why we need to trim the watch list, but that’s a different issue and has a different set of problems.) (And yes, yes, those million other people are only the US citizens on the list.) This still leaves the problem of what they’re supposed to do when some rich guy complains that his son has fallen in with the wrong crowd.

Here are some hard questions: Do we search every kid who pissed off a relative? Do we search everyone who ever went to Yemen? Damascus? How about people who change planes? Travel in carry-on? Have funny underwear?

The answer is that we can’t do that, and even if we do, we merely teach the bad guys how to adapt. The point of defense-in-depth is that you stack a series of defenses, each of which is only a partial solution and the constellation of them works, not any given one. Airport screening worked some — he didn’t get in a good detonator. Passenger resistance worked some — once there was a firecracker-like explosion and a fire, they saved the plane. Defense-in-depth in toto worked.

This is not the reason to disband DHS. This is not the reason to sack Napolitano. Note that I did not say that DHS shouldn’t be disbanded. Nor did I say that Napolitano shouldn’t be sacked, merely that if you’re looking for a reason, this isn’t it.

If we look at what happened and think about what we could do better, DHS isn’t involved. The visa issue is the one to examine and DHS doesn’t give out visas, State does.

My criticism of DHS is that they flinched. They’ve put up these brain-dead stupid policies that are going to annoy travelers and are as likely to make us less safe, not more safe. They should have said that the system worked and there will be no changes so have a happy new year and stay calm.

I am willing to cut them a bit of slack, but if they don’t change their tune to “Keep Calm and Carry On,” then there will be a reason to start demanding heads. Sending people to Yemen was the right response. No headphones on the plane is the wrong one.

If DHS and TSA want to give people reason to call for firings and disbandings, they should keep doing what they’re doing now, not then.

Life is Risk. Keep calm and carry on is good advice for the rest of us, too. The vast majority of us are more likely to be struck by lightning while being eaten by a shark than we are to be a victim of a terrorist. Nonetheless, there are bad, crazy people out there. Sooner or later, no matter what we do, somethings’s going to happen. A plane will go down, a ship will have a bomb on it, a train will be attacked, or something will happen.

The actual risk of terrorism is so low that most adaptations are worse than the threat. More people died in traffic accidents as a result of shunning airplanes after 9/11 than in the actual attacks. After those attacks, the best terrorist second punch would have been a simple suicide bomber in the airport security lines.

When we wring our hands because we think that risk should be zero, we’re part of the problem, too. Schneier is right: we need more investigation and counter-terrorism and less security. Kudos to CNN and Maddow for airing a bit of reason.

So we should all thank our lucky stars that PETN isn’t as easy to detonate as we’re told. We should thank the same stars for passenger resistance. And we should breathe a sigh of relief for an incident that was botched so badly it’ll make others think twice or three times or more. And while you’re at it, don’t play with sharks in a thunderstorm.

According to the Wall St Journal, “Iranian Crackdown Goes Global ,” Iran is monitoring Facebook, and in a move reminiscent of the Soviets, arresting people whose relatives criticize the regime online.

That trend is part of a disturbing tendency to criminalize thoughts, intents, and violations of social norms, those things which are bad because they are prohibited, not bad in themselves. It’s important if we want to export freedom of speech and freedom from self-incrimination, to push for an international norm of limiting the powers of governments, not of people. Of course, since the main way that the international reach of governments is limited is through treaties negotiated by, umm, governments, I don’t expect a lot of that soon.

Not to mention the creation of fake Facebook accounts by Iranian intelligence.

But most interesting is this:

Five interviewees who traveled to Iran in recent months said they were forced by police at Tehran’s airport to log in to their Facebook accounts. Several reported having their passports confiscated because of harsh criticism they had posted online about the way the Iranian government had handled its controversial elections earlier this year.

and

One 28-year-old physician who lives in Dubai said that in July he was asked to log on to his Facebook account by a security guard upon arrival in Tehran’s airport. At first, he says, he lied and said he didn’t have one. So the guard took him to a small room with a laptop and did a Google search for his name. His Facebook account turned up, he says, and his passport was confiscated.

South African runner Caster Semenya won the womens 800-meter, and the attention raised questions about her gender. Most of us tend to think of gender as pretty simple. You’re male or you’re female, and that’s all there is to it. The issue is black and white, if you’ll excuse the irony.

There are reports that:

Two Australian newspapers reported Friday that gender tests show the world champion athlete has no ovaries or uterus and internal testes that produce large amounts of testosterone. … Semenya is hardly alone. Estimates vary, but about 1 percent of people are born with abnormal sex organs, experts say. These people may have the physical characteristics of both genders or a chromosomal disorder or simply ambiguous features. (“When someone is raised female and the genes say XY,” AP)

The athletics associations rules don’t cover all of these situations well. The real world is far messier and more complex than most people have cause to address. There are a great many apparently simple things that are really complicated as you dig in.

What the sports associations and news media are doing to Semenya is reprehensible. (There are over 10,000 stories listed on Google News, versus 13,000 for Derek Jeter, who just broke a Yankees record.) She didn’t come into running knowing that she had no ovaries. Having to deal with the identity issues that her testing brings up under the harsh light of the entire world (including me) is simply unfair.

It’s unfair in almost the same way as the British government’s treatment of Alan Turing, the mathematician who Time named one of the 100 most important people of the 20th century for his fundamental work on computers and cryptanalysis. Turing was also a convicted homosexual who committed suicide because of his “treatment” with estrogen, which caused him to become impotent and to develop breasts.

While Turing was dealt with under the law of the time and we can’t put the clock back, his treatment was of course utterly unfair and I am pleased to have the chance to say how deeply sorry I and we all are for what happened to him. Alan and the many thousands of other gay men who were convicted as he was convicted under homophobic laws were treated terribly. Over the years millions more lived in fear of conviction.

I am proud that those days are gone and that in the last 12 years this government has done so much to make life fairer and more equal for our LGBT community. This recognition of Alan’s status as one of Britain’s most famous victims of homophobia is another step towards equality and long overdue.

Sports officialdom and state governments are different. Sports are voluntary associations, although athletes have little influence on the choices of international sports functionaries. Either way, watching the chaotic world crash onto the inflexible bureaucracies is tremendously frustrating to me.

As more and more of the world is processed by Turing Machines, assumptions that seem obvious to the programmer are exposed harshly at the edges. A friend with a Juris Doctorate recently applied for a job online. The form had a field “year you graduated from high school” that had to be filled out before she went on. Trouble is, she never did quite finish high school. She had the really relevant qualification-a J.D. from a good school. But she had an emotionally wrenching choice of lying on the form or not applying for the job. She eventually chose to lie, and sent a note to the HR people saying she’d done so and explaining why. I doubt the fellow who wrote that code ever heard about it.

I have a challenge to anyone involved in creating an online identity management system: How well does your system handle Semenya?

The typical answer is either that “that’s configurable, although we don’t know if anyone’s done exactly that” or “she’s an edge case, and we deal with the 95% case really well.” If you have a better answer, I’d really like to know about it. And as a product guy, those are likely the decisions I’d make to ship.

I’ll close by echoing Brown’s words: We’re sorry, you deserve so much better.

I got a 240 when I didn’t give them my SSN, and my score dropped to 40 when I submitted my SSN. [Editor’s note: Huh? Giving out your SSN lowers your risk of ID theft? That seems an odd message.]

Everybody talks about identity fraud, but nobody does anything about it. This does something about it – specifically, it will help stop the worrying on the part of people who don’t need to. And it will give people who should worry a few things to do to get their situation under control. The more that can be done to demystify identity fraud, the better – and the less likely there will be unwise legislation and regulation that ultimately harm the interests of consumers.

My ID Score is a statistical score that’s based on technology currently used by leading communications, financial services, retail companies, healthcare providers, government agencies, and consumers to assess your risk of identity theft. These companies use ID Analytics’ scoring technology to ensure that fraudsters do not apply for goods and services in an innocent consumer’s name

So I think this is not really your ID theft risk, but the perception that their software has. To put it another way, it’s the trouble someone is likely to experience when they try to open a new account in the name you’re giving MyIdScore.com

When you put someone’s information in, they ask you a bunch of questions about them, like “which of these phone numbers have you used?” It’s not clear how well that works when the attackers can access the same databases through their breaches.

At least six men suspected or convicted of crimes that threaten national security retained their federal aviation licenses, despite antiterrorism laws written after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, that required license revocation. Among them was a Libyan sentenced to 27 years in prison by a Scottish court for the 1988 bombing of Pan Am 103 over Lockerbie.

It’s long been a truism of economics that the cost of anything is the foregone alternative. In this case, a huge amount of our air travel security spending goes into ensuring that you can’t fly if your name and ID don’t quite match (looking at you, Jim), rather than preventing convicted terrorists from getting aviation licenses.

The information that TSA
requires us to request is full legal name, other names used, Social Security number (optional), citizenship, Alien Registration
Number (if applicable), current home address, primary and secondary telephone numbers, current email address, date of birth,
place of birth, gender and height. TSA also lists as optional, but helpful, the following personal information: home addresses,
driver’s license number and employer’s name and address…digital photo and digital images of all of your fingerprints and your irises…your credit card.

This raises a very serious problem with a company like Clear/Verified Identity Pass, Inc. The in-depth, validated customer data is likely to count amongst such a company’s most valuable assets. Their privacy policies make no mention of what would happen to it in the event that the company goes bust.

Does anyone know where Clear was incorporated? Maybe I’ll bid at the bankruptcy auction.

[Update: Tamzen points out that there’s an update on their site, promising that Clear will abide by the “Transportation Security Administration’s Security, Privacy and Compliance Standards” and “take appropriate steps to delete the information.” Google thinks that those standards might refer to “Transportation Security Administration’s Security, Privacy and Compliance Standards.” Me, I wonder why they say “take appropriate steps” rather than just promising to delete it. Back in the day, Brill’s Content might have taken them to task for that.]